The Man Who Couldn't Sleep Part 21

"But the odd thing about her," I languidly explained, "is that she evades only those who seek her. She is coy. She denies herself to those who most pa.s.sionately demand her. Yet something tells me that she is hovering near me at this moment, that she is about to bend over me with those ineffable eyes if only I await the golden moment. And so, my dear sir, if you will take this as a slight reward for your trouble, and cover that exceedingly soiled-looking divan in that exceedingly disreputable-looking alcove with a clean tablecloth, and then draw that curtain which is apparently designed to convert it into a _chambre particuliere_, you will be giving me a chance to consort with an angel of graciousness more lovely than any meretricious head that ever soiled its faded plush. And if I am left uninterrupted until you go off in the morning, your reward will then be doubled."

His puzzled face showed, as he peered down at the bill in his hand, that if this indeed were madness, there was a not repugnant sort of method in it.

So he set about in a half dazed fas.h.i.+on draping that none too clean divan with a table-cloth, making it, in fact, look uncomfortably like a bier. Then he carried my hat and gloves and overcoat to a chair at the foot of the divan. Then he took me by the arm, firmly and solicitously.

His face, as I made my way without one stagger or reel into that shabby little quietude screened off from the rest of the world, was a study in astonishment. It was plain that I puzzled him. He even indulged in a second wondering glance back at the divan as he drew the portieres.

Then, if I mistake not, he uttered the one explanatory and self-sufficient word--"Needle-pumper."

I heard him tiptoe in, a few minutes later, and decently cover my legs with the overcoat from the chair. I did not speak, for bending over me was a rarer and sweeter Presence, and I wanted no sound or movement to frighten her away. Just when her hand touched mine I can not tell.

But I fell off into a deep and natural sleep and dreamed I was being carried through Sicilian orange groves by a wall-eyed waiter with wings like a b.u.t.terfly.

Then the scene changed, as scenes have the habit of doing in dreams. I seemed to be the center of a sub-cellar conference of highwaymen, presided over by Latreille himself. Then the voices s.h.i.+fted and changed, receded and advanced. I seemed to be threading that buffer-state which lies between the two kingdoms of Sleep and Wakefulness, the buffer-state that has no clear-cut outlines and twists like a weevil between ever-s.h.i.+fting boundaries.

"Where's Sir 'Enery," said a voice from a mountain-top. Then an answering murmur of voices buzzed about me like bees, only an intelligible word or two seeming to reinforce the fabric of my imaginings as iron rods reinforce concrete-walls. And I continued to lie there in that pleasant borderland torpor, which is neither wakefulness nor slumber. I seemed to doze on, in no ponderable way disturbed by the broken hum of talk that flickered and wavered through my brain.

"Then why can't Sir Henry work on the Belmont job?" one of the voices was asking.

"I told you before, Sir Henry's tied up," another voice answered.

"What doing?" asked the first voice.

"He's fixing his plant for the Van Tuyl coup," was the answer.

"What Van Tuyl?"

"Up in Seventy-third Street. He's got 'em hog tied."

"And what's more," broke in a third voice, "he won't touch a soup case since he got that safe-wedge in the wrist. It kind o' broke his nerve for the nitro work."

"Aw, you couldn't break that guy's nerve!"

"Well, he knows he's marked, anyway."

Then came a lull, followed by the scratch of a match and the mumbling of voices again.

"How'd he get through the ropes up there?" inquired one of these voices.

"Same old way. Butlering. Turk McMeekin doped him up a half-dozen London recommends. That got him started out in Morristown, with the Whippeny Club. Then he did the Herresford job. But he's got a peach with this Van Tuyl gang. They let him lock up every night--silver and all--and carry the keys to bed with him!"

"It's up to Sir 'Enery to make 'em dream he's the real thing," murmured another of the voices.

"Sure!" answered still another voice that seemed a great distance away.

Then the mumble became a murmur and the murmur a drone. And the drone became a sighing of birch tops, and I was stalking Big-Horn across mountain peaks of _cafe parfait_, where a pompous English butler served _peches Melba_ on the edge of every second precipice.

When I woke up it was broad daylight, and my wall-eyed waiter was there waiting for his second bill. And I remembered that I ought to phone Benson so he could have the coffee ready by the time I walked home through the mellow November air.

It was two hours later that the first memory of those murmuring midnight voices came back to me. The words I had overheard seemed to have been buried in my mind like seeds in the ground. Then here and there a green shoot of suspicion emerged. The more I thought it over, the more disturbed I became. Yet I warned myself that I could be sure of nothing. The one tangibility was the repeated word, "Van Tuyl."

And there at least was something on which I could focus my attention.

I went to the telephone and called up Beatrice Van Tuyl. Years before we had played water polo and catboated on the Sound together. I realized, as I heard that young matron's cheery voice over the telephone wire, that I would have to pick my steps with care.

"I say, Beatrice, are you possibly in need of a butler?" I began as offhandedly as I was able.

"Out of a place, Witter dear?" was the chuckling inquiry that came to me.

"No, I'm not, but I know of a good man," was my mendacious reply. "And I rather thought--"

"My dear Witter," said the voice over the wire, "we've a _jewel_ of a man up here. He's English, you know. And I'm beginning to suspect he's been with royalty. Jim's always wanted to stick pins in his legs to see if he really isn't petrified."

"What's his name?"

"Just what it ought to be---the most appropriate name of Wilkins."

"How long have you had him?"

"Oh, weeks and weeks!" Only a New York householder could understand the tone of triumph in that retort.

"And you're sure of him in every way?"

"Of course we're sure of him. He's been a Gibraltar of dependability."

"Where did you get him from?"

"From Morristown. He was at the Whippeny Club out there before he came to us."

"The Whippeny Club!" I cried, for the name struck like a bullet on the metal of memory.

"Don't you think," the voice over the wire was saying, "that you'd better come up for dinner to-night and inspect the paragon at close range? And you might talk to us a little, between whiles."

"I'd love to," was my very prompt reply.

"Then do," said Beatrice Van Tuyl. "A little after seven."

And a little after seven I duly rang the Van Tuyls' door-bell and was duly admitted to that orderly and well-appointed Seventy-third Street house, so like a thousand other orderly and well-appointed New York houses hidden behind their unchanging masks of brown and gray.

Yet I could not help feeling the vulnerability of that apparently well-guarded home. For all its walls of stone and brick, for all the steel grills that covered its windows and the heavy scroll work that protected its gla.s.s door, it remained a place munificently ripe for plunder. Its solidity, I felt, was only a mockery. It made me think of a fortress that had been secretly mined. Its occupants seemed basking in a false security. The very instruments which went to insure that security were actually a menace. The very machinery of service which made possible its cloistral tranquillity held the factor for its disruption.

As I surrendered my hat and coat and ascended to that second floor where I had known so many sedately happy hours, I for once found myself disquieted by its flower-laden atmosphere. I began to be oppressed by a new and disturbing sense of responsibility. It would be no light matter, I began to see, to explode a bomb of dissension in that princ.i.p.ality of almost arrogant aloofness. It would be no joke to confound that smoothly flowing routine with which urban wealth so jealously surrounds itself.

I suddenly remembered there was nothing in which I could be positive, nothing on which I could with certainty rely. And my inward disquiet was increased, if anything, by the calm and blithely contented glance Beatrice Van Tuyl leveled at me.

"And what's all this mystery about our man Wilkins?" she asked me, with the immediacy of her s.e.x.

"Won't you let me answer that question a little later in the evening?"

"But, my dear Witter, that's hardly fair!" she protested, as she held a lighted match for her husband's cigarette. "Do you know, I actually believe you've spotted some one you want to supplant Wilkins with."